Breakfast with Lucian

by Geordie Greig

  Most of the great pictures of the last twenty-five years of his career had been painted a quarter of a mile away in the Holland Park studio. His house in Kensington Church Street had originally been bought to try to have a more comfortable life, and add an extra layer of privacy – always an obsession with him. He told one girlfriend that they might move in there together, but in the end that idea was far too entrapping.1 It became an alternative workplace but was more domesticated than the grimy squalor of Holland Park, where old Fortnum & Mason porcelain jars of caviar sat on his kitchen dresser alongside a chipped vase of congealed paintbrushes, dust-laden audio cassettes of Johnny Cash and old Christie’s catalogues and corkscrews. Only in his last four years did he essentially abandon Holland Park for Kensington Church Street, where he used two rooms on the first floor as his full-time studio. He had liked a split existence in two places. Both were properties which today are worth millions of pounds, so different from his impoverished start in Paddington, when he used to scrape together the rent from his apparently modest income generated by his grandfather’s royalties. Wherever he was, the only real purpose was to have a sanctuary in which to paint.

  Almost every day after breakfast in Lucian’s final three years, David would pose naked on an old mattress while Lucian worked on his last painting, Portrait of the Hound. It showed Eli the whippet dwarfed by the life-size nude figure of David. The title was a minor witticism for a major work, his finale: monumental and moving.

  His last painting also cemented something that had been the case from Lucian’s earliest days: he was wedded to the idea and practice of figurative art. He ignored abstraction, expressionism, postmodernism and conceptual art, and was disdainful about them, certain that prolonged and intense observation of the human figure was the core of an artist’s purpose. A surprising amount of his early work has survived, stretching back seventy years. It includes some naive childhood drawings made in Germany and, more importantly, a sketchbook he had begun in 1941 when working as an ordinary seaman aboard the SS Baltrover, a cargo vessel chartered for Atlantic crossings. His canon is extensively varied, from delicate pencil drawings in the margins of love letters to mammoth canvases with swathes of naked flesh in oil paint, no two pictures the same in scale or composition.

  Although eventually he became a symbol of figurative boldness as a modern artist, that was not how he was viewed in the 1970s and 80s, when America felt he had been left behind by the vanguard of expressionism and abstraction. He was entrenched in life-study portraiture and he made it provocative. ‘It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious,’ he said. It was often a lonely path. But while his art was deeply rooted in tradition, he made pictures that were at times considered shocking, dangerous, unsettling.

  The bare facts of Lucian Freud’s life also form a gripping narrative. As Sigmund Freud’s grandson, born in 1922, Lucian fled Germany in 1933 with his parents, Ernst and Lucie, to avoid the Holocaust. It was a move prompted by the murder of one of his cousins by Nazi thugs in broad daylight outside a café in Berlin. The shadow of death and flight made Lucian hunger for the fullest life in England, smashing through conventional morality and ignoring any rivals. His was a race to leave a permanent mark, and painting was the obsessive centre of his life.

  Eli resting in the artist’s Notting Hill studio

  Even in his eighties, lithe, lively and a global art star, he could walk into a room and turn heads, a charged presence. In his studio he would sit in a chair with his legs slung over its arms, almost louche in his pose, flexible as a teenager. As his picture framer, Louise Liddell, simply put it: ‘He was dishy, always was.’2 Intellect and emotion collided in his work and his life, as he used people to whom he was attracted to produce pictures which combined visual impact and psychological intent. They captured an intensely observed truth of what was before him, from the spread thighs of women exposing their genitalia to blank eyes of inconsolable men in awkward poses. He changed the mood and language of portraiture.

  He married twice and officially fathered at least fourteen children.3 His reputation in the bedroom as well as in his studio was newspaper fodder for many decades (‘Is he the greatest lover ever?’ asked the Daily Mail). Some of his children posed naked for him, including his son, Freddy, aged twenty-nine, in a life-size, full-frontal portrait. Lucian was frank and fearless. When Sir James Goldsmith, the billionaire entrepreneur, sent him a letter saying if he painted his daughter he would have him murdered. Lucian replied: ‘Is that a commission?’ The only letter he sent me, before we met, read: ‘The idea of giving you an interview makes me feel sick.’

  In his final years, long after he had left the area, Paddington traders who worked in Smithfield meat market would shout out ‘Hey Lou, what’s doing?’ when he popped into a café for breakfast. He liked this connection to the rougher parts of society, yet was equally at ease staying at Ascott, the Buckinghamshire family home of the banking grandee Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, where he particularly admired the eighteenth-century horse paintings by George Stubbs. He liked to mingle with high society and low society rather than with the bourgeois middle classes, but seldom travelled outside London. ‘I travel vertically, rather than horizontally,’ was his memorable description of this mingling of social axes.4

  Freud was fascinating to every new generation and moved in many circles within each. In the 2000s he painted Jerry Hall and Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles (former husband of Prince Charles’s wife, the Duchess of Cornwall), while in the 1940s and 50s it had been Stephen Spender and Francis Bacon. He was considered a wunderkind when he arrived in England in September 1933 as a ten-year-old refugee with an extraordinary talent for drawing. Eight decades later, he was still making people stare in restaurants and galleries, his status almost more that of a rock star than a portrait painter.

  In his final years, in the evening Lucian liked to sit at table 32 in a corner of the Wolseley, a café-restaurant in the grand European tradition, on Piccadilly. In the most glamorous restaurant dining room in London, other diners watched him twist his head round to see who was present. He was not name-checking, but focusing on napes, knees, faces, legs, arms and even ears. He was far more interested in how people looked than who they were. When the actress Keira Knightley sat near him one night when I was with him, Lucian had no idea who she was, as he never watched films or television. Admiring her, he asked me if I knew her.

  Lucian, aged 87, in a moment of relaxation.

  He was an extraordinary presence in an often celebrity-filled room. Richard Wallace, then editor of the Daily Mirror, sensed his charisma, emailing me two days after Lucian died. ‘I was surprised how much I felt his loss. I didn’t know him – apart from the odd staring match at the Wolseley. In fact, the last time I saw him was a few Saturdays ago when I popped in for a solo lunch and he was on the next table with a pneumatic young blonde. As I unfurled my paper he suddenly boomed with great ferocity, and a touch of hostility, “That man’s reading the Daily Mirror.” I could feel him glaring at me, but was too terrified to meet his gaze.’

  Lucian’s alternative table was number 25, nearer the entrance but still within the inner quadrangle of tables. He was a familiar sight, night after night, the waiters extremely protective, shepherding away the over-curious. He always paid in crisp £50 notes. Often he ordered a half-pint of Atlantic prawns which he peeled and shared with his guests. He rather grandly liked food which might have come from one of the country estates of his aristocratic friends, such as pheasant and grouse.

  In some ways, Lucian’s upwardly mobile path in his adopted country closely echoed that of Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), another European émigré who under Charles I became more English than the English. Van Dyck had the dukes of Buckingham and Norfolk as his patrons, Lucian had the dukes of Devonshire and Beaufort. Van Dyck painted Charles I, while Elizabeth II sat for Lucian. Both artists had sophistica
ted and varied social lives, although the Flemish painter was more modest in his procreational tally. He had just two daughters, one by his mistress and the other by his wife. Both men conquered English society as the most formidable portraitists of their age.

  A sense of nobility was important to Lucian. When I asked if he had been bullied as a German Jew while working on a British merchant navy ship in the early 1940s, his reply was simply that the sailors saw him as a gentleman. And he could also be as boisterously disruptive as a member of an Oxford dining society. Aged eighty-four, Lucian once chucked breadsticks at a man who used flash to take a photograph in the Wolseley. The man approached him to remonstrate. Lucian, forty years older, squared up to him and was prepared to fight. The man complained later that Lucian had ruined their daughter’s birthday. ‘Let’s be honest,’ said Jeremy King, co-owner of the Wolseley, ‘he made it. He was fearless, that’s what I liked about him. He was not an aggressive person, but when provoked he was one of the most antagonistic.’5

  Lucian told me how Francis Bacon tried to calm him down: ‘He asked me why I always got into fights, and suggested a less abrasive manner: “Use your charm.”’ He had punch-ups all his life. In the 1960s the Thane of Cawdor crept up to him at the Cuckoo Club in Piccadilly at around 4 a.m. and lit a newspaper that he was reading. Lucian hit him in the face before they sat down and shared a drink and a cigar. In his eighties, Lucian had a fist fight in a supermarket in Holland Park after a dispute at the checkout. Sometimes he went completely over the top, as he did once at Bibendum, the Fulham Road restaurant. It was late at night and as Lucian and his bookmaker and friend Victor Chandler sat down, a waiter – obviously gay – said, ‘Hello boys, been to the theatre, have we?’

  Lucian spat out, ‘What fucking business is it of yours if we have been or not?’ There was a stunned silence. ‘Just because we’re two men together at eleven o’clock at night, there’s no reason to assume we’re poofs like you.’

  ‘For God’s sake, shut up please,’ said Victor.

  ‘Well, why should he assume?’ said Lucian. ‘I don’t care what anyone one is, but why should he assume?’ He then hit the waiter while Victor grabbed his shoulder to hold him back.

  When going for another meal together, this time at the River Café, Lucian and Victor once walked in at the same time as two North London Jewish couples. ‘Lucian could be terribly anti-Semitic, which in itself was strange, and as these people entered the restaurant the scent wafting from the two women was overpowering. Lucian shouted: “I hate perfume. Women should smell of one thing: cunt. In fact, they should invent a perfume called cunt.” He was drunk and loud but the other couple heard him and were highly offended. I pleaded to them, “Please don’t think anything of it, he’s mad and drunk,”’ said Victor. ‘The staff were horrified and I kept saying, “Shush, Lucian,” and he kept saying, “I won’t shush,” and you know, the other usual things.’6

  Jeremy King made sure Lucian was well looked after at the Wolseley, which was a relaxing diversion in the evening from the restricted space and intense work of his studio. The restaurant kept his own wines in their cellar, and at random they pulled out great vintages. (The Rothschilds had asked Lucian to design a label for their Mouton-Rothschild cuvée, and he offered a drawing done in the 1940s rather than a new one, as requested.)

  Lucian chose an astute observer when he selected King as a subject, who sat for hundreds of hours for a painting during 2006–7, and then an etching that was incomplete when Lucian died. A powerful ‘space baron’ who controlled the best tables in town, King had allegedly been immortalised by Harold Pinter in his play Celebration as the ultimate elegant maître d’. Lucian would teasingly tell people that ‘Jeremy is a black belt and can kill a man with one move’ – which was completely untrue, but Lucian liked to maintain this fallacy. He would sometimes invent a semblance of the truth, not exactly a lie, more a poetic truth, something which sounded right (or which he believed to be right).

  King recalled that ‘He loved to sing “Cheek to Cheek” or “You’re the Top”, and we would compete to see who knew the lyrics best. When it came to songs he was a great romanticist, but with limericks more visceral.’ It was impossible to compete with Lucian anecdotally, because at the end of a song he would remember that he had danced to it with Marlene Dietrich. There were jokes, gossip, character assassinations, lyrics, limericks and much badinage. ‘Every syllable he managed somehow to inject with an extra bit of character or exclamation,’ said King. Sometimes it was just simple word play, such as in his jokey description of one critic’s exhibition of paintings as being more like ‘works of aunts’ than ‘works of art’. He made most things sound or seem less ordinary, be it the cut or shape of a lapel, or his thoughts on love, or even spinach: ‘I can imagine that if a woman I was in love with cooked spinach with oil, I would also enjoy the slight heroism of liking it, although I didn’t usually enjoy it served that way.’7

  There was a playfulness and a contrariness, sometimes a desire to be noticed, in him and in his art, despite his love of privacy. It was partly why he was such good company. ‘I do like to show off, not in the studio but when I am with people, I know that,’ he said. His party trick had once been a headstand which his photographer friend Bruce Bernard captured memorably on film, with his daughter Bella sitting next to him, simultaneously bemused and impressed. He often shocked people. His imitation of a whale masturbating, witnessed at lunch at the River Café by Sue Tilley (‘Big Sue’, who sat for Benefits Supervisor Sleeping), did exactly that. Not everyone was amused.

  He liked the last word, and could be tricky and impulsive, once sending a letter to a Tate curator stating ‘Nicholas Serota is a Liar; I have never owned that picture’. The curator had simply been following up a request, pre-arranged by Serota in his role as the Tate director, to borrow the Francis Bacon picture Two Figures (1953), which hung opposite Lucian’s bed in his house in Notting Hill. Always known by Lucian as ‘The Buggers’ owing to its homosexual content, it had caused uproar when first exhibited. It was based on Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of naked men in motion, several volumes of whose work were among Lucian’s books. The painting was technically owned by Lucian’s friend Jane Willoughby, but while merely trying to say how grateful the Tate was, the curator had mistakenly implied in his letter that Lucian owned it, which was why he sent his extreme and unreasonable response. (The picture was never lent, although Lucian did donate a painting of the head of Leigh Bowery to the Tate, and Serota and Lucian remained friends.)

  Lucian was not very interested in money, but delighted in knowing what price his paintings fetched at auction, even when he no longer owned them. Aged eighty-five, he was extremely pleased when Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was bought in May 2008 by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich at Christie’s for £17.2 million, achieving the highest price for any living artist. Becoming rich did not alter his life. Even without money he had lived well. He was capable of great acts of generosity to those close to him (some sitters were given houses) yet would never give anything to a charity auction. It was too public a gesture. When Leigh Bowery was fined £400 in court for having sex in a public lavatory Lucian stepped in to pay, as he did for Bowery’s body to be flown back to Australia after he died of AIDS. Lucian hated leaving a trail, and was reluctant to sign his name in any book, especially any art book or catalogue of his own work. If obliged he would sometimes write ‘By himself’ and draw an arrow pointing to his name.

  Many sitters and lovers felt tethered and trapped by his sheer force of personality, but year after year, they came back for more. ‘A lot of my sitters are girls who have some sort of hole in their lives that is filled by posing for an artist,’ he once said. ‘What I really need is dependability, for them to carry on turning up.’ And there were casualties in his wake: discarded lovers, hurt and offended children, letters left unanswered or replies of stunning rudeness, debts left unpaid, insults traded. His rules, or indeed lack of them, meant he simply did what he
wanted, pursuing his art and his own pleasures at whatever the cost, never compromising. It was a blatantly selfish life, but one which he was happy to explain and defend. Although he was glad to accept his Companion of Honour (CH) and Order of Merit (OM), when he wrote to the prime minister in 1977 to turn down a CBE, he said: ‘I hope it will be understood that I have come to this decision for selfish reasons.’8 (He always jocularly referred to his two honours collectively as his ‘CHOM’. He lent the CH to one daughter for a fancy-dress party and it subsequently went missing. The OM insignia was handed back to the Queen by David Dawson in a private meeting at Buckingham Palace a few months after Lucian’s death, as required by the protocol relating to this prestigious and exclusive honour.)

  Lucian, April 2010

  He was accused of infidelity, cruelty and absenteeism as a father, yet in spite of sometimes defiantly selfish behaviour some of his children and girlfriends, and even the children of his girlfriends, would still defend him over what was pretty indefensible behaviour. All his life he got away with it. He was so charged with charm and charisma, few were immune to his power of seduction on some level. ‘He was as magical as he was malign, a totally bewitching, terrifyingly clever figure who like a silver thread through a pound note had an undoubted streak of evil. I worshipped every inch of him while being terrified,’ said Lady Lucinda Lambton, whose mother Bindy, Lady Lambton, was one of Lucian’s lovers for over twenty-five years. He asked to paint Lucinda naked but she felt intimidated and uncomfortable and refused.